HP Compaq A909 laptop is shutting down...

Good evening...I have already presented this problem on another website and have had zero responses. I have an HP Compaq Presario A909 laptop that shuts down after approx 10 minutes. I believed it to be an overheating problem (and it still might be) so I took it apart (very nervously I might add!) and found that the fan is not easily accessible. Anyway, I used quite a bit of compressed air on it and cleaned what I could, though not to my satisfaction. I just didn't want to do any damage to it.

After putting it back together I plugged it in and crossed my fingers only to find the same problem, except NOW I think my fan is not working at all!

Before the computer shut down I was able to check the event viewer and it stated that Winidows shut down, the cause? BSOD.

That was not a big surprise because my laptop has been giving me BSOD problems for a little while now. That's why I finally backed up all of my files and did a factory restore to it...this was before I decided to take it apart.

I have dual CPU's...one fan? I thought that was strange too since the last laptop I had like that had a fan for each CPU. I'm running Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit with 2gigs of RAM. I have just bid on a new fan for it on E-Bay and already bought a new plug for it as well.

I forgot to mention that I felt underneath the area where the heatsink and fan are on the body of the laptop,and for only running 10 minutes it seemed unusually warm.

My laptop is just not liking me and I miss it! I would be so very grateful to anyone who could make some sense of this mess for me or to me so I can get her back up and running well!

taking apart these is never fun. If i remember correctly, the heat sink covers part of the computers fan, so you may need to remove it to access the whole set up.(this brand is problematic when it comes to this.) if it is still under warranty you may want to contact them, as another issue might be the motherboard(or so I hear)

Yes, it's true...the fan and heat sink are nearly impossible to get to. That's why when I cleaned it I used an entire can of compressed air trying to shoot it in those areas. No warranty, it's expired.

The thing I find to be so very strange about all this is that Windows says the shutdown is happening because of the BSOD. Through the research I've done it seems to me that BSOD can be a HARDWARE problem????

I was getting, like I said in my first statement, BSOD errors, Fatal Errors with a blue screen...sometimes I would turn it on and Windows would not be able to load so I would do a start-up repair and it worked. I'm utterly confused! I'm thinking I have more than one issue to deal with here and it's very upsetting. Right now I'm on my old lappie which is also a Compaq C502US and the hard drive is so full it runs really slow and I can't do Windows updates. This one is running Vista Home Basic and it's because of the partition that Vista automatically creates, I guess. That, plus I have 2 gigs of RAM and it's only recognizing one! I took this RAM out of my other laptop and switched them because I had just bought the RAM in my other laptop so I knew it was good. I checked the way I had installed it to make sure they were plugged in properly and ??? Well, this laptop IS my back-up, but it's been extremely good to me. I've spilled water on it twice and a black cherry soda once. (You never saw a laptop come apart so fast in your life!) and it still runs, but barely. It's about to quit on me so I've GOT to get my other one up and slowly put this poor old workhorse back together.

Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question. I guess I'm going to have to go to a website where they show you step by step how to take my laptop apart so I can replace the fan. Now I'm wondering if I shouldn't have ordered a new heat sink with the fan? It's not like I have a bunch of money either, or I wouldn't be doing this work myself, so I just don't know. It sure is a nice lappie...if it worked!

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